Justice Samuel Alito said he thought about retiring at the end of last term but stayed on the Supreme Court because he can still make a valuable contribution.
In a CBS News interview with chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford, the 76-year-old justice gave a direct answer when asked whether he weighed stepping down. “I thought about it,” Alito said, then explained why he did not leave.
The Hill reported that Alito framed the choice in plain terms: he still has work worth doing. That decision keeps one of the court’s most consistent conservative votes on the bench for now, even as age and politics keep retirement talk alive every term.
Alito is the court’s second-oldest justice, behind Clarence Thomas, who is 78. President George W. Bush put him on the high court a little more than two decades ago. He sits in the court’s conservative bloc with Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch.
Crawford pressed him on whether Republican pressure played a role. She described “some pretty intense pressure” from Republicans who wanted a confirmation while the GOP held the Senate. Alito did not describe that pressure as the deciding factor.
“Well, it’s something I think that somebody at my age has to think about every term,” he said. “But I thought that I could still make a valuable contribution, which is why I became a justice and a judge in the first place. So that is basically it.”
Breitbart noted the same remarks and the wider stakes: a vacancy during President Trump’s time in office could give the White House another Supreme Court nomination. Alito did not cast his choice as a partisan move. He cast it as a judgment about whether he can still do the work.
He also said the retirement question does not go away. Someone his age, he said, would “have to” keep thinking about it every year.
That stance tracks an earlier signal. In August he told the Wall Street Journal, “obviously I’m here for another term,” shutting down talk that he was on his way out. Readers tracking that earlier message can also revisit when Justice Alito confirms he will serve another Supreme Court term amid similar pressure.
Crawford asked whether a future exit might “risk undoing all the work that you have done here at the court,” drawing a comparison to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Liberals spent years urging Ginsburg to time her departure for a friendly president. She stayed. After her death, the vacancy went to a Republican White House.
Alito refused to script his own exit around election calendars. “I think it’s too hard to predict,” he said. “It’s too hard to predict, for anybody, particularly when you reach a certain age, what your situation will be a year from now, two years from now, and so forth.”
“And it’s too hard to predict what the political situation will be, and what any president might do with respect to a replacement,” he added. In other words, he will not pretend he can lock in the next decade of politics from the bench he holds today.
While he remains, Alito has kept a full docket footprint. That includes recent moments when Alito and Thomas challenged the Supreme Court majority over blocked mail-in ballot safeguards, another reminder that personnel on the court still shapes the rules voters live under.
Retirement fever has already produced a public error. On the final opinion day of the court’s term, NPR reported that Alito had announced he was leaving. The network retracted the story.
Fox News reported NPR’s own correction: “Earlier today we erroneously published a story saying that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. He has not announced his retirement and we have retracted the story.” NPR editor Thomas Evans blamed a misunderstanding by correspondent Nina Totenberg, who apologized to Alito in a letter. Sources told Fox News he is not stepping down this term and is hiring clerks for the next one.
The false alarm fit a larger pattern critics have flagged for years. The Washington Free Beacon argued that NPR moved fast to fix the Alito story while leaving a long trail of other contested reporting untouched, an accountability gap that matters when a publicly known outlet shapes the country’s first draft of court news.
Alito’s actual record is quieter than the rumor mill. He has also handled ethics flashpoints by stepping back when required, including when Justice Samuel Alito stepped aside from a major Exxon climate case after stock-holding questions, and parallel recusals from other energy damages suits.
Those moves did not shrink his role on the core constitutional fights that define this court. They showed a justice still present for the work, still answering for conflicts when they arise, and still refusing to treat every media retirement drill as destiny.
Separate coverage has tracked the same pattern in other climate damages matters, including when Justice Alito stepped aside from a Colorado climate case against oil companies. The through-line is continuity: he remains on the court unless and until he decides otherwise.
At 76, after more than twenty years on the court, Alito is past the point where retirement talk ever fully dies. Crawford’s questions made that plain. So did his own answers. He will revisit the choice each term. He will not pretend he can forecast his health, his energy, or the next map of presidential power.
What he would not do is treat the seat as a bargaining chip timed to a single Senate majority. He said he stayed because the job still matches the reason he took it: useful service under the Constitution, not a news cycle.
For conservatives who watched the Ginsburg years turn into a warning about delayed exits, Alito’s candor cuts both ways. He is honest that age forces the question. He is equally clear that contribution, not partisan panic, is the standard he is using right now.
Justices are not campaign props. When one says the work still matters and proves it by staying, that is the constitutional order working as designed, not a crisis for the cable clock.
